Resistive switching at the nanoscale in the Mott insulator compound GaTa4Se8

Vincent Dubost; Tristan Cren; Cristian Vaju; Laurent Cario; Benoît Corraze; Etienne Janod; François Debontridder; Dimitri Roditchev

doi:10.1021/nl401510p

Resistive switching at the nanoscale in the Mott insulator compound GaTa4Se8

Nano Lett. 2013 Aug 14;13(8):3648-53. doi: 10.1021/nl401510p. Epub 2013 Jul 22.

Authors

Vincent Dubost¹, Tristan Cren, Cristian Vaju, Laurent Cario, Benoît Corraze, Etienne Janod, François Debontridder, Dimitri Roditchev

Affiliation

¹ Institut des Nanosciences de Paris, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, CNRS UMR 7588, Paris, France.

PMID: 23826620
DOI: 10.1021/nl401510p

Abstract

We study the Mott insulator compound GaTa4Se8 in which we previously discovered an electric-field-induced resistive transition. We show that the resistive switching is associated to the appearance of metallic and super-insulating nanodomains by means of scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS). Moreover, we show that local electronic transitions can be controlled at the nanoscale at room temperature using the electric field of the STM tip. This opens the way for possible applications in resistive random access memories (RRAM) devices.